Wednesday, January 21, 2015

To Travel or to Work? Maybe We Can Have Both

By Kelly Martin, Toppel Peer AdvisorFour years ago as a senior in high school going through the
college application process I heard the same question over and over- where are
you going to school next year? Now as a second semester senior in college, I
hear a similar question repeated constantly- where are you working after
graduation? When I was applying to colleges, at least I could give a list of
the schools I had applied to or the schools I was deciding between. But now
that the real world is just around the corner in May, I don’t really have a
bunch of options I can list off to satisfy people’s questions. While some of my
friends are lucky enough to know where they’ll be going post graduation, it
seems a large majority of us don’t, and it’s a constant source of stress among
us because of course after you graduate, you have to immediately figure out
your life and get a job… right?While studying abroad in Sydney, Australia, I met countless
Europeans around my age, who were travelling for a year after graduating from
college, or “uni” as they call it. And what struck me about this was that this
was apparently completely normal, and they also said that there were always
Australian students travelling all over Europe for the year after their
graduation. Americans are somewhat notorious for not venturing outside of our
borders- only 30% of our population have passports, compared to Canada’s 60%
and the UK’s 75%- and that stems from a lot of different things. But this
experience abroad really opened my eyes to how different our view of the way we
“should” live our life is compared to many other places in the world.While it’s common, and realistically somewhat encouraged, to
travel for a gap year either before or after university in other countries, in
the United States it’s often looked down upon. One of my best friends in high
school took a gap year before starting college, and she received a lot of
skeptical questions and comments about it, but ultimately it was one of the
best things she’s ever done. In a world that is unbelievably interconnected and
only becoming increasingly so, you’d think we would encourage young people to
travel more. Arguably just in my 4.5 months living abroad, I learned more
things about myself and life in general than I did in the previous 4 semesters
of college. Travelling abroad you learn so many life skills- meeting new
people, facing unexpected challenges, adapting to new environments and
cultures- all of which are realistically incredibly important life skills, even
for the workplace.So I’m not saying we should all just drop everything and go
travel (though I wish I could). But maybe soon to be graduates like myself
shouldn’t be putting so much pressure on ourselves to figure everything out
before that looming graduation date in May. The rest of the world seems to have
figured out that a little bit of exploring can ultimately help you become a
more well rounded person, more focused, and ready for a job, so maybe we should
follow their example. Source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/02/04/americans.travel.domestically/